


Confines, wards and dungeons

by Lilliburlero



Category: Grantchester (TV)
Genre: Gen, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-16
Updated: 2015-10-16
Packaged: 2018-04-26 16:21:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5011513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard considers Sidney's concept of 'private life'.</p><p>*</p><p>Note: all the (internalized and other) homophobia you might expect, mention of capital punishment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Confines, wards and dungeons

‘Funny how a man can be murdered, and all anyone’s worried about is his private life,’ Sidney declared.

Leonard thought it was rather an extraordinary thing to say to someone to whom you’d been introduced by your sister’s former schoolfriend, now―thanks to your efforts―on remand for killing her lover’s wife. Or it would be, if he'd actually meant _private life_ , and not tolerant normality’s kindly euphemism for baffling inversion. 

‘The Church has made its position clear,’ he said primly. ‘It’s something from which deliverance should be sought.’ 

Surely Sidney Chambers, of all men on earth, should recognise deliberate self-laceration when he heard it. He didn’t, though. 

‘Do you agree?’ 

The east window glowed; light from the side-windows struck clouds of dust, giving it nearly the quality of mist. Leonard couldn’t believe Sidney quite so clueless, but the alternative was to believe him cruel. 

Aiming for irony, he shot hopelessly wide. ‘It’s not my place to make any statement to the contrary.’ He winced inwardly; his Lancashire vowels sounded all the more conspicuous for being squeezed from a tight throat. 

‘So you think that these men, men like―Ben―’ 

Like Ben. _Now, there’s tact for you, ducky_ , pronounced a voice from a life abandoned years before. 

‘―should be loc―locked up, for eighteen hours a day, in solitary confinement―’ 

Sidney’s tone, sweetly modulated but ragged with sincerity, belonged to the chancel step. Leonard admired and envied its capacity to move and arouse. _Ooh, talk about every maiden’s prayer,_ said the remembered voice, and departed, leaving Leonard chilled and quivering, afraid to turn his head and see malice confirmed in the glint of a blue eye or the curve of those full lips. He steeled himself and looked across the aisle. 

‘―for years on end?’ 

To his astonishment, Leonard felt neither relief nor gratitude to see that Sidney’s face was as earnest as his voice, but rather indignation, and something even less righteous, which approached the condition of contempt. Leonard turned his eyes back to the altar. It would probably be impious, he thought, with a faint sense of his own absurdity, to quote in church words put in the mouth of an evil angel by a playwright said to be an atheist―not to mention the other thing. But he thought them all right: _nor am I out of it_. 

Seeming to perceive a rebuke, though not the reason for it, Sidney shifted in the pew. 

‘Will you tell the police?’ Leonard asked. 

‘If I don’t, they won’t know the whole story. A murderer could walk free.’ 

‘And if you do, the consequences for Ben―’ Leonard replied. ‘It will destroy him.’ He flinched; his instinct to conceal and dissemble ashamed him. A man had been stabbed to death. The wary whey faces of the Taylor children hung before his eyes; small pinched masks. But their father’s killer might be just some vicious little bit of rent, nothing to do with the blackmail business at all. God knows, a queer’s life could easily contain both those things separately, if he was unlucky enough. But Sidney Chambers didn’t know, and he wasn’t God. 

Sidney gave him a quick, half-apologetic glance (which Leonard consciously failed to meet) and left the church in a few decisive strides. Leonard wondered if, amid his concern for other men's privacy, Sidney realised how very publicly he comported himself, visibly compensating for unexpiated wartime guilt and recent amorous rejection with lives ended on the gallows? Leonard was shocked at the jaundice of this thought about a man he loved, but even―especially―after Vic Blackwood’s arrest, he found it impossible to put away.

**Author's Note:**

> Leonard and Sidney's dialogue is taken verbatim from series 1, episode 4.
> 
> Leonard thinks of the words of Marlowe's Mephistophilis, in answer to Faustus's question 'How comes it then that thou art out of hell?': 'Why this is hell, nor am I out of it' ( _Dr Faustus_ , Act 1, sc. 3); the title is from _Hamlet_ , Act 2, scene 2, which is the other Renaissance-drama thing he might have thought.


End file.
